Earth2100

Lucy was born June 2, 2009 in Miami and was still alive in the year 2100. After a powerful hurricane hit Miami when she was a child she and her parents moved to San Diego. She became an EMT and met her husband, Josh, an engineer, during a protest against high water prices of California desalinated seawater (Las Vegas had run dry). They and their young daughter, Mollee, moved to New York City by car, passing desperate Texans begging for rides north. One pulls a gun on the daughter, fortunately, others in the car/truck convoy point automatic weapons on the desperate man, who backs down. While the others in the convoy made it to Canada, New York City was a marvel of clean power, clean transit, and community gardening. Josh is building a sea barrier to hold back the ocean, but the CO2 warming unleashes trapped methane in the Arctic which causes even faster, non-linear warming. An effort to use sulfur dioxide as a last resort to cool the planet is called off when it is found to destroy the ozone layer. Lucy finds and helps quarantine and neutralize a strange new disease, and Mollee moves upstate to an agricultural community. During a storm at high tide, Josh is killed trying to fix a stuck gate, and New York City is flooded. Lucy refuses Mollee's offer to live with her, her husband and son. Starving people among the rotting flood damage set the stage for the return of the disease Lucy saw, now called Caspian fever. Caspian fever kills so many people on Earth that population growth starts shrinking, and eventually it dawns on Lucy and every American that there is no Federal response, no National Guard, no soldiers to keep order. Democracy and civilization at the national level have died in America. Lucy leaves the city with some friends and a dog, and eventually finds her daughter, now a widow like herself, and her grandson. Initially there was no communication with the world until someone set up a two-way radio. In 2100, she ponders what wisdom to pass along to her grandson, now denied the education she took for granted, as she is the oldest person in the community.